Novel events - Anne Tyler

National Review, Sept 1, 1989 by Carol Iannone

ANNE TYLER'S ten novels before the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons are all readily available in cheap paperback editions. Each of them is garnished with a sampling of the kind of criticism Miss Tyler tends to collect ("phenomenal," "astonishing," "wonderful," "marvelous," "extraordinarily good"), and each features a short back-cover introduction that in

vites us into the story almost the way radio announcers introduced soap operas years ago ("And when Morgan crashes into the lives of two lovely young newlyweds, no one's heart is safe"). The novels themselves are painstaking chronicles of the vicissitudes of middle-class family life, and notwithstanding that her hardcover publisher is the prestigious Alfred A. Knopf, one might have felt secure in assessing Miss Tyler as a pop novelist with a large audience probably more female than male.

But on almost all the paperback editions of her works can be found, as well, a rather ominous quotation from an anonymous New York Times reviewer. "Miss Tyler," we are told, "is steadily raising a body of work of major dimensions." Her penultimate novel, The Accidental Tourist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1985 and was made not just into a movie but into a presumably more elegant "movie event," according to the cover copy. Miss Tyler was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she has become the subject of scholarly articles and dissertations. And now, for Breathing Lessons, the Pulitzer Prize. What has happened? Has a "major artist" emerged while we weren't looking?

This seems to be the opinion of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which found that with The Accidental Tourist Anne Tyler, writing fiction since 1964, had at last "slipped into the front ranks of American writers."

Miss Tyler is of course a "woman writer" ("among the finest women writers publishing in this country today," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer), and this can't be dismissed as an element in her success. Still, she is no feminist. Her female characters do flirt with ideas of independence but usually come to stitch themselves rath

er firmly back into the familial fabric from which they were beginning to unravel. Miss Tyler is more or less a realistic writer, and one can sense in her admiring critics a certain relief at finding approachable characters, accessible narratives, and old-fashioned plots after struggles with modernism, minimalism, metafiction, etc.; this too may be a source of her appeal. But the real key to her rise in reputation might well lie in the way she seems to speak to the odd mixed mood of resignation and hope that characterizes the liberal mind at this moment.

As is no news to anyone, a soberer appreciation of middle-class life has emerged from the ruins of the counterculture, although this new sense of acceptance can come with some continuing disappointment at the limitations of this life and a hope for some kind of change. One can readily see variations on this disposition in a new journal like Tikkun (and perhaps some

times in the magazine Miss Tyler herself writes for, The New Republic), and in films like Field of Dreams. In her own, different way, Miss Tyler also responds to this mood, mostly by giving expression to all its shades and inflections. Novel by novel she takes her readers through the milestones and upheavals of middle-class life-birth, death, marriage, divorce, remarriage, sibling rivalry, mid-life crisis, generational conflict, empty-nest syndrome, etc.-and always lands them on their feet. She manages to be both celebratory and rueful, both ordinary and madcap, and sometimes even mildly bizarre. She can embrace the continuity of family life as well as the disruptions of abandonment, leave-taking, and divorce. She can weave in all kinds of cultural types-flower children, teenage mothers, abandoned wives, even hostage-takers-without losing a shred

of narrative complacency. With her all-encompassing, non-judgmental, lowgrade-soap-opera formats, she seems to offer the reassurance that anything can happen (The Accidental Tourist, for example) or that nothing can happen (Breathing Lessons, for example), and that either will be okay.

The sense of reassurance conveyed by a Tyler novel begins with the form of her plots, since, somewhat in the manner of a romance novelist, she basically writes the same story over and over again, although she works and reworks and modifies and qualifies

and contracts and expands with more surface variety. In some way or another she typically sets a disencumbered but often sterile and lonely individualism against the complex and inexorable vortex of life and its attachments. Her novels can feature boarding houses populated by various oddballs, and ancestral homes filled with quirky families, clusters of sisters, bunches of brothers, bundles of babies, eccentric grandmothers, crusty grandfathers, spinster aunts, bachelor uncles, uneasy inlaws. When a character leaves home, a bus ride, a train ride, a car ride becomes a chance for Miss Tyler to introduce additional characters who represent the ceaseless pulse and flow of life. Against the pulse and flow, certain individuals may more or less conduct a usually inchoate personal struggle, or sometimes hide out in family connections grown stale and barren. The task is ordinarily to learn or to accept or to renegotiate some kind of attachment, although Miss Tyler covers all bets by sympathizing with the restless or sullen loners who cannot quite accommodate themselves to the busy (and often inadvertently airless) domesticity that dominates her books.